Did You Make a New Year’s Resolution?
Contributed by Marilyn Bennett
Did you make a New Year's Resolution? Did you already renege on your resolution? By that I mean, if you resolved to be nicer, were you already short tempered or not very nice to someone? Also, if you resolved to lose weight and then downed a box of chocolates. Of course, you justified that "pig out", reasoning that it was part of a plan to get temptations out of the way early in the year. Did you resolve to exercise more and count walking around the grocery store as exercise? Let's be honest, it never works to make grand resolutions as it is too easy to rationalize them away and then feel guilty.
To lessen the guilt in my life I have settled on a yearly "To Do List" instead of a New Year's resolution. It is more fun, in that it is not necessary to do everything on the list. It's sort of like being catholic without the guilt. In other words I can feel proud about how many things on my list I accomplished last year and just put what I did not get done on my new 2025 list.
Another fun way to do these lists is to have more than one. There is of course, the "Dream List" which includes anything and everything that you know you will probably never even seriously consider doing. Then there is the "Wish List", this is a great fantasy list - but just like the "Genie in the Bottle", who grants three wishes perhaps it is just as well that most are not granted.
However, some things to remember when doing a To Do List is not to get too specific. In other words rather than saying "Volunteer at my favorite charity weekly", just reframe this as: "Volunteer more this year." That pushes you to volunteer more without making you feel bad if you don't volunteer in a particular place every week. Same thing for exercise, instead of saying, "I will commit to going to exercise three times a week" Why not state it like this: "Schedule exercise each month as needed."
To show you what I mean, one month I committed to writing 50,000 words and when I only wrote 30,000 words I felt like a failure. That was an excellent month for me, and I should have been proud of myself. If I had simply said that I had lot of interesting things to write about, I would have been very proud that I did get in lot of writing that month.
I saw a question on the internet the other day that asked what would you do if you received a million dollars tomorrow? Of course, the first thing I thought of is the fun stuff - like a new car - trip to New York to see the newest Broadway play. But then, when I got to seriously thinking about it, I realized that my life was pretty complete right now and a lot of money all at once might only disrupt things. With today’s prices I could probably be able to fritter away a million with some help from my family in a few years. But what about 50 million? It made me really consider if I would want the changes such a huge amount of money could bring into my life. It turned out to be a good exercise as it definitely made me consider what is really important to me and would an influx of money make things better or only complicate my rather settled life.
The main thing the exercise did for me was to make me look at my life and decide that things were pretty good for me. Of course, there are always things one would like to change, and a little more money can generally always come in handy, but when life is good it is probably best to settle back and just enjoy what we have. Life is lived one day at a time and if we have some purpose in our day-to-day activities, it can be a wonderful life. Sometimes, it just takes some serious thinking about our life to realize what is really important.
So, make a New Year's Resolution if it makes you happy or write a "To Do List" to remind yourself of what to look forward to in the new year. But always remember that the difference between the "glass half full" and the "glass half empty" is attitude.
Hope you have a wonderful 2025. I plan to write many more interesting, insightful, thoughtful or just rambling articles this year.
Hope you enjoy them.